A comprehensive approach to handle the dynamics of customer’s needs in Quality Function Deployment based on linguistic variables

In the contexture of a customer-driven goods or service design process, a well-timed update of customer’s requirements may not only serve as a necessity indicator to observe how things change over time, but also it incorporates the firms a better ground to interoperate different strategies to meet the future needs of its customer. This paper proposes a systematic methodology to deal with the customer needs’ dynamics, in terms of their relative weights, in the QFD. Compared with previous research, the contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, it applies some linguistic variables to get preferences of customers and experts to determine the relative importance of customer requirements (CRs) and the relationships between customer requirements and engineering characteristics (ECs). Second, it proposes the implementation of a forecasting technique. Third, it describes more comprehensively on how future uncertainty in the weights of customer’s needs could be estimated and transmitted into the design attributes. Fourth, it proposes the implementation of a quantitative approach, which takes into account the decision maker’s attitude towards risk to optimize the QFD decision making analysis. Finally, a real-world application of QFD is provided to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed methodology

Some further studies on improving QFD methodology and analysis

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) starts and ends with the customer. In other words, how it ends may depend largely on how it starts. Any QFD practitioners will start with collecting the voice of the customer that reflects customer’s needs as to make sure that the products will eventually sell or the service may satisfy the customer. On the basis of those needs, a product or service creation process is initiated. It always takes a certain period of time for the product or service to be ready for the customer. The question here is whether those customer-needs may remain exactly the same during the product or service creation process. The answer would be very likely to be a ‘no’, especially in today’s rapidly changing environment due to increased competition and globalization. The focus of this thesis is placed on dealing with the change of relative importance of the customer’s needs during product or service creation process. In other words, the assumption is that there is no new need discovered along the time or an old one becomes outdated; only the relative importance change of the existing needs is dealt with. Considering the latest development of QFD research, especially the increasingly extensive use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in QFD, this thesis aims to enhance the current QFD methodology and analysis, with respect to the change during product or service creation process, as to continually meet or exceed the needs of the customer. The entire research works are divided into three main parts, namely, the further use of AHP in QFD, the incorporation of AHP-based priorities’ dynamics in QFD, and decision making analysis with respect to the dynamics. The first part focuses on the question "In what ways does AHP, considering its strength and weakness, contribute to an improved QFD analysis?" The usefulness of AHP in QFD is demonstrated through a case study in improving higher education quality of an education institution. Furthermore, a generalized model of using AHP in QFD is also proposed. The generalized model not only provides an alternative way to construct the house of quality (HoQ), but also creates the possibility to include other relevant factors into QFD analysis, such as new product development risks. The second part addresses the question "How to use the AHP in QFD in dealing with the dynamics of priorities?" A novel quantitative method to model the dynamics of AHP-based priorities in the HoQ is proposed. The method is simple and time-efficient. It is especially useful when the historical data is limited, which is the case in a highly dynamic environment. As to further improve QFD analysis, the modeling method is applied into two areas. The first area is to enhance the use of Kano’s model in QFD by considering its dynamics. It not only extends the use of Kano’s model in QFD, but also advances the academic literature on modeling the life cycle of quality attributes quantitatively. The second area is to enhance the benchmarking part of QFD by including the dynamics of competitors’ performance in addition to the dynamics of customer’s needs. The third part deals with the question "How to make decision in a QFD analysis with respect to the dynamics in the house of quality?" Two decision making approaches are proposed to prioritize and/or optimize the technical attributes with respect to the modeling results. Considering the fact that almost all QFD translation process employs the relationship matrix, a guideline for QFD practitioners to decide whether the relationship matrix should be normalized is developed. Furthermore, a practical implication of the research work towards the possible use of QFD in helping a company develop more innovative products is also discussed. In brief, the main contribution of this thesis is in providing some novel methods and/or approaches to enhance the QFD’s use with respect to the change during product or service creation process. For scientific community, this means that the existing QFD research has been considerably improved, especially with the use of AHP in QFD. For engineering practice, a better way of doing QFD analysis, as a customer-driven engineering design tool, has been proposed. It is hoped that the research work may provide a first step into a better customer-driven product or service design process, and eventually increase the possibility to create more innovative and competitive products or services over time

SIMULATION-BASED DECISION MODEL TO CONTROL DYNAMIC MANUFACTURING REQUIREMENTS: APPLICATION OF GREY FORECASTING - DQFD

Manufacturing systems have to adapt to changing requirements of their internal and external customers. In fact, new requirements may appear unexpectedly and may change multiple times. Change is a straightforward reality of production, and the engineer has to deal with the dynamic work environment. In this perspective, this paper proposes a decision model in order to fit actual and future processes’ needs. The proposed model is based on the dynamic quality function deployment (DQFD), grey forecasting model GM (1,1) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The cascading QFD-based model is used to show the applicability of the proposed methodology. The simulation results illustrate the effect of the manufacturing needs changes on the strategic, operational and technical improvements

A Proposed Framework of Kansei Engineering Application in Dealing with Customer Emotional Needs in Services

Many studies on product designs have been widely conducted with a focus on functionality rather than human emotions. However, customers today are very dynamic and no longer focus only on functionality needs. Emotions increasingly, play an important role in purchasing decision. In dealing with customer emotional needs, Kansei Engineering is proposed. This approach captures customers’ desires and feelings (emotions/kansei) concerning products and translates these emotional needs into concrete product design. Kansei Engineering has been applied extensively in product design, but not in services. A service is an intangible product. It is the fastest growing sector in today’s businesses. Some prominent tools such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Kano’s Model are often used in services, but not incorporating customer emotional needs. In addition, some attentions have been widely used in investigating customer emotional satisfaction in services. However, there is not a formal methodology that can account for customer emotional needs. Therefore, to fill in these niches, this paper provides a proposed framework of Kansei Engineering in services. The proposed framework incorporates QFD and Kano’s Model as methods which focus on customer satisfaction. By applying Kano’s Model, customer needs are exploited through a questionnaire, and, service attributes are classified. QFD is then used to transform customer emotional needs into engineering characteristics. In addition, other models such as Bayesian Network (BN) and Markov Chain are utilized as well. The latter two models are useful to promote prediction and diagnostic inference with a probability view point due to the dynamics of customer emotional needs. The use of such supporting models will enhance the ability of the Kansei Engineering methodology to meet a sudden change or trend of customers’ emotional needs. Essentially, the proposed framework will start and end with customers to achieve customer emotional satisfaction. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the Kansei Engineering approach in service design, this paper provides an illustration. A simple literature survey was conducted at a university field. A majority of the students spend most of their time on campus. Why do students spend so much time at the university when they can better spend their time elsewhere, such as at home? How can a university be made a convenient second home for students? In this research, these two questions will be answered and tackled by introducing a modified Kansei Engineering method. The university does not only provide an academic service, but also an emotional experience for students. It is hoped that by introducing an improved innovative framework of Kansei Engineering, it could increase the level of customer satisfaction in pursuit of customer loyalty and a long-term relationship eventually

Time versus market orientation in product concept development : empirically-based theory generation

Includes bibliographical references (p. 27-31).Supported by the US Navy, the International Center for the Research of the Management of Technology at MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Center for Quality Management in Cambridge, Mass.Gary Burchill, Charles H. Fine

A Three-Year Focused Initiative to Reduce Maternal Distress for Better Child Outcomes

During pregnancy and the first two years of parenting (i.e. the perinatal period) maternal distress (trauma, depression, and/or stress) can create an environment for the developing fetus and, later, for the very young child that will have negative developmental and educational impacts over the course of the child's life.  Too many children are born into isolated, vulnerable families where these multiple stressors give rise to an inhospitable environment for the critical first years of development.For the past decade, especially with advances in understanding brain development and its connections to lifecycle outcomes in development and health, research has increasingly focused on the role of stress in childhood morbidity and mortality.  Evidence is mounting that stress in pregnancy may be a significant factor contributing to negative birth outcomes (e.g. premature birth and low birth weight).The effects of maternal distress in pregnancy are frequently reinforced and potentially worsened by an environment of "toxic stress" for a baby or young child.  Toxic stress can change the expression of certain traits over the life course of an individual, potentially accounting for the higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and developmental delays seen in many children living in poverty

Reconfigurability Function Deployment in Software Development

In the forthcoming highly dynamic and complex business environment high-speed and cost-effective development of software applications for targeting a precise, unique and momentary set of requirements (no more-no less) associated to a customized business case will bring sig-nificant benefits both for producers and users. This requires a life cycle change-oriented ap-proach in software development. In this respect, designing software with intrinsic evolutionary resources for reconfiguration represents the sound approach. A methodology for concurrent deployment of reconfigurability characteristics in software applications is introduced in this paper. Its potential is exemplified in a case study dealing with web-based software tools to support systematic product innovation projects.Reconfigurability, Software Development, Innovation, TRIZ, RAD

An Uncertain QFD Approach for the Strategic Management of Logistics Services

Due to customers’ growing concern about logistics performances related to products, logistics service increasingly contributes to the core competence of an enterprise or product, which calls an appropriate tool to develop effective strategic actions to improve logistics performances and gain customer satisfaction. Therefore, an uncertain quality function deployment (QFD) approach for selecting the most effective strategic actions in terms of efficiency to meet the customer requirements is developed in this paper, which integrates uncertainty theory into the traditional QFD methodology in order to rationally deal with imprecise information inherently involved in the QFD process. The framework and systematic procedures of the approach are presented in the context of logistics services. Specifically, the calculations for the prioritization of strategic actions are discussed in detail, in which uncertain variables are used to capture the linguistic judgements given by customers and experts. Applications of the proposed approach are presented as well for illustration

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Systematic Innovation - ICSI 2016

It is our pleasure to welcome you at the 7th International Conference on Systematic Innovation. It is our objective to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of recent advances in the field of TRIZ Methodology, Knowledge-Based and Systematic Innovation. The goal is to enable practitioners, researchers and scientists to exchange ideas on the these topics and to provide an international forum for exchanging new ideas and recent achievements by the TRIZ community and enabling further advances and collaboration with the industrial community. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to the members of the organizing, scientific and technical committees. The reviewers of the papers had a very important job, contributing significantly to the success of the conference. We also wish to express our thanks to our invited speakers. Very special thanks to our students, sponsors and to all who helped us with logistics, conference website, and publications. Welcome to Portugal and Lisbon. We hope you all have a very happy and rewarding meeting.publishersversionpublishe

A weighted interval rough number based method to determine relative importance ratings of customer requirements in QFD product planning

Customer requirements (CRs) play a significant role in the product development process, especially in the early design stage. Quality function deployment (QFD), as a useful tool in customer-oriented product development, provides a systematic approach towards satisfying CRs. Customers are heterogeneous and their requirements are often vague, therefore, how to determine the relative importance ratings (RIRs) of CRs and eventually evaluate the final importance ratings is a critical step in the QFD product planning process. Aiming to improve the existing approaches by interpreting various CR preferences more objectively and accurately, this paper proposes a weighted interval rough number method. CRs are rated with interval numbers, rather than a crisp number, which is more flexible to adapt in real life; also, the fusion of customer heterogeneity is addressed by assigning different weights to customers based on several factors. The consistency of RIRs is maintained by the proposed procedures with design rules. A comparative study among fuzzy weighted average method, rough number method and the proposed method is conducted at last. The result shows that the proposed method is more suitable in determining the RIRs of CRs with vague information